Investigation of language and motor skills in Serbian speaking children with specific language impairment and in typically developing children

Specific language impairment (SLI) is usually defined as a developmental language disorder which does not result from a hearing loss, autism, neurological and emotional difficulties, severe social deprivation, low non-verbal abilities. Children affected with SLI typically have difficulties with the acquisition of different aspects of language and by definition, their impairment is specific to language and no other skills are affected. However, there has been a growing body of literature to suggest that children with SLI also have non-linguistic deficits, including impaired motor abilities. The aim of the current study is to investigate language and motor abilities of a group of thirty children with SLI (aged between 4 and 7) in comparison to a group of 30 typically developing children matched for chronological age. The results showed that the group of children with SLI had significantly more difficulties on the language and motor assessments compared to the control group. The SLI group also showed delayed onset in the development of all motor skills under investigation in comparison to the typically developing group. More interestingly, the two groups differed with respect to which language abilities were correlated with motor abilities, however Imitation of Complex Movements was the unique skill which reliably predicted expressive vocabulary in both typically developing children and in children with SLI.

Measuring societal awareness of the rural agrarian landscape: indicators and scale issues

The work presented in this report is part of the effort to define the landscape state and diversity indicator in the frame of COM (2006) 508 “Development of agri-environmental indicators for monitoring the integration of environmental concerns into the common agricultural policy”. The Communication classifies the indicators according to their level of development, which, for the landscape indicator is “in need of substantial improvements in order to become fully operational”. For this reason a full re-definition of the indicator has been carried out, following the initial proposal presented in the frame of the IRENA operation (“Indicator Reporting on the Integration of Environmental Concerns into Agricultural Policy”). The new proposal for the landscape state and diversity indicator is structured in three components: the first concerns the degree of naturalness, the second landscape structure, the third the societal appreciation of the rural landscape. While the first two components rely on a strong bulk of existing literature, the development of the methodology has made evident the need for further analysis of the third component, which is based on a newly proposed top-down approach. This report presents an in-depth analysis of such component of the indicator, and the effort to include a social dimension in large scale landscape assessment.